KOTA OPEN UNIVERSITY
FIRST CONVOCATION CEREMONY
February 10, 1996
Remarks by
Professor Gajaraj Dhanarajan
President, The Commonwealth of Learning, Vancouver
Your Excellency,
Vice Chancellor,
Members of the Academic Community,
Graduands, Parents and Friends,
Distinguished Guests,
Bhaiyo aur Bahino,
It is a great privilege for me to be here today to receive this wonderful honour from the University and to share with you the joy of your first degree congregation. From the sidelines, I have watched this University grow and how wonderful it is to see it cross this important milestone. My colleagues from the Commonwealth of Learning as well as peers from other Distance Teaching Universities around the world welcome this culmination of your efforts as a University and look forward to seeing or hearing of many many more congregations to come in the years ahead. Let me also add how grateful I am to receive your accolade and how honoured I am to be one of your alumni.
This is indeed a proud day for all the new graduates. The fulfilment of a dream of receiving a university education and demonstrating that by successfully taking the challenge of examinations, through months of sheer tenacity, single-mindedness, ambition, drive, perseverance and hard work, deserves not only our congratulations but also our praise and admiration. There are not many people in the world who can
do what our new graduates have done, that is, combining work, social and family commitments with learning. Graduates, I consider it a great honour to be standing here in your midst to celebrate your graduation. I share in your happiness. No doubt, through your success, you have enabled the Kota Open University to cross its most important milestone and I wish to take this opportunity to congratulate the management and staff of the University for helping you to succeed in your learning.
Your Excellency Mr. Chancellor, Vice Chancellor and friends: like our new graduates of today and throughout the world, but more particularly throughout our Commonwealth, thousands of men and women are undergoing training, retraining, learning and reskilling in a variety of disciplines through providers such as the Kota Open University and departments or centres of external, off-campus and correspondence studies. They are undertaking this education in the context of increasing wealth, prosperity, better education, shifting economic activity and longer life. They are able to do this because, starting with the late sixties, the world has seen the establishment and growth of institutions such as the Kota Open University in significant numbers. There are many reasons for the growth of open education towards the latter part of this century. Of these, perhaps, four stand out as particularly significant. They are:
. an effort by many governments to clear past backlogs of unsatisfied demand for education generally and higher education particularly;
. a need to provide a larger supply of tertiary places for a younger and larger population which had successfully acquired pre-tertiary education;
. a desire to meet the graduate manpower needs of an expanding public sector employer of newly independent nations; and
. an attempt at deriving greater cost-benefits from investments in education.
However, as we begin to move towards the next millennium, those of us who practice distance education may have to ask ourselves whether we will still continue to be relevant to the populations of the 21st century?
In early 1991, the much respected British Royal Society of the Arts released a report called "Learning Pays." In it, they described the need for creating a learning society and defined such a society as "one in which everyone (in the community) participated in education and training throughout their life. It would be a society characterised by high standards and low failure rates. In the past, we have too often allowed ourselves to believe that high standards can only be attained at the expense of high rates of failure; or that low levels of failure necessarily entail low standards. In the learning society that would not be the case."
What this definition implies and is becoming clear in many parts of the world is that Education or the desire to be educated need not or does not stop at a particular point in a person's life. Through the intervention of examinations, graduation ceremonies and awards, education is life-long and given the phenomenal expansion of
knowledge, technologies, political and business alignments, individuals should constantly be learning, retraining and reskilling in order to be better employers, employees, peers, colleagues, parents, siblings and citizens. In a learning society, both individuals and society accept these learning and teaching responsibilities. It is a society in which:
. learning is accepted as a continuing activity throughout life;
. learners take responsibility for their own progress;
. assessment confirms progress rather than brands failure;
. capability, personal and shared values and team work are recognised
equally with the pursuit of knowledge; and
. learning is a partnership between students, parents and teachers, employers and the community, all of whom work together to improve performance.
Should this development take place, and there is every indication that it would, then in all likelihood distance teaching institutions such as Kota will become major players in education in the 21st century. However, in order to be relevant these institutions need to have a clear view of their targets, the products that their clients need and a strategy to create and deliver them. For a large number of adults, the flexibility and convenience of distance education will remain the only alternative to continue learning; for governments and employers the cost-efficiency of delivering training through distance education will remain attractive; for colleagues and families it will remain the most socially acceptable form of support without disruption to personal commitments.
Having said those words of optimism on a role for distance education in the 21st century, it will be misleading if, at the same time, I do not caution that open universities will need to re-engineer themselves to deliver to a vastly different kind of clientele than their present ones. The students of the 21st century will have a lot more prior learning and training than those we are dealing with today, they will have skills to use sophisticated courseware, have perhaps more financial resources, or access to it through employers and friends and their educational and training needs will be different.
Reaching these skilled and educated clients through the traditional means of print, audio, video and written feedback will be a handicap in terms of slowness, sparseness and interactiveness. The use of newer and humanly interactive technologies will not only enable access to feedback rapidly between tutor and student but also between student and student. On-line education through computer networks will provide the opportunities for group learning that is active and interactive.
It is said that just thirty years ago, more than half the workers in the rich countries spent their time making things. Today, less than 20% of them do so because machines do most of the mundane and repetitive work. Information technology is
infiltrating every aspect of our lives. Planning, pricing, ordering, paying, designing, engineering, distributing, selling and scheduling are all being processed by the computer. The average technologist is said to become, unless refreshed, obsolete within two years. The same will apply to those who practise health care, social welfare, child care, law, accountancy or even crime prevention, and the need to refresh their knowledge and skills on a regular basis will become a continuous obligation. As designers of learning for a learning society, distance educationists will face tremendous challenges and opportunities in addressing the needs of the coming century. Our opportunities are limitless. These opportunities need not be limited to the public sector only. A relationship with business and industry and other private sector entities is also another definite direction. Efforts in the area of continuous professional education need to be enhanced as occupational relevance of courses are generally attractive to private funding.
Already, such radical initiatives are being experimented in many parts of the world. These allow for learning contracts between teaching institutions and industry in which the learners receive credits for courses designed jointly by academic institutions and employers, certification for job training, assessment of prior experiential learning and many more options.
To meet the needs of the new learners and the learning environment of the future will require organisations that are innovative. Ways have to be found to deliver courses at new locations, link networks of training sites, develop certification protocols, develop strategies of course development, provide clearing house functions for course-related information and have in place systems that will allow institutions to respond rapidly and meaningfully to needs, accreditations, credit banks and transfers. Organisations will have to do more in terms of linking students to tutors, tutors and tutors and students and students. Innovative institutions may also have to explore new ways to enable their students to continue with their studies as they move from location to location, be willing to use materials not developed by themselves, develop courses jointly with others and radically change the ways in which they assess learning outcomes.
Developing an interactive, learner responsive, life long educational provision requires substantial resources. Who will pay for these? In my mind the three parties that stand to benefit from the learning will have to accept responsibility to meet the financial needs of the life long learner of the next century. First, society or government has to accept their share of the financial responsibility as they stand to derive enormous benefits from a well educated citizenry. Learning empowers, it creates choice and without choice we cannot be free. Continuous and life-long education of the individual is one of the best safeguards of democracy. Governments support of this safeguard, which also enhances the productivity of the nation, is vital.
The second party that could reasonably be expected to pay part of this cost for life-long education are employers. They collectively derive benefits from a better educated workforce and therefore have good economic reasons to support adult learning. Learning organisations are the good corporate citizens of the future.
Finally, the third party that should be expected to support life-long learning are the learners themselves. They stand to benefit enormously, immediately and continuously from investments in learning and it would be unacceptable to large parts of society that such beneficiaries do not pay for at least part of the cost.
Your Excellency, Vice Chancellor and friends, having come into existence during the exciting sixties and seventies, distance education and those who participate in it can look forward to the next century with hope. The intervening period between now and the next millennium should give us time not only to consolidate our position as major providers of adult education but also an opportunity to explore new ideas, alliances and innovations.
To our new graduates today, I have this to say. Learning does not stop with the acquisition of your qualification this morning. This is only the beginning. This graduation has confirmed not only your ability in yourself but also the validity of the new way of learning that you undertook. As you progress through life and career, you
will find a need to return to learning over and over again. When you do return to study, you will find universities like the KOTA OPEN UNIVERSITY waiting to serve you. I congratulate your present success and wish you well in your future endeavours.
NAMASTE!
